Assembly Placement Point

New in v4, is the ability to easily modify the placement point of an assembly using a simple tool!

The placement point refers to the insertion point or the position of the path relative to the assembly parts. The placement point is the point that is attached to the cursor when using the build tool.

In the image below, a cavity wall assembly was built along the ground plane by clicking three points on the perimeter of a rectangle.  The current placement is at the bottom of the brick and above the grade beam which results in the grade beam being completely below the ground plane.

What if we now wanted to change this wall so that the bottom corner of the grade beam was at ground level?  With the new Placement Point tool, this only takes a few seconds!

First, click the 'Placement Point' button to activate the tool.

The view changes so that you are looking in the direction of the assembly extrusion.

The green dot indicates the current placement point.  Click another point to set a new placement point.  In this example, we'll click the bottom left corner of the grade beam.

Immediately after clicking the new point, the assembly will shift so that the clicked point will be at the origin (0, 0) of the assembly.  The offset values of the assembly parts will be automatically adjusted.

You can continue to click other points and you can use a previously clicked point as a reference to set the actual point desired.

For example, if you want the placement point to be 10 inches to the left of the bottom corner, first click the bottom corner, then move the mouse to the left of the point and type 10" <Enter> to set the point.

If you make a mistake when choosing a point, press BACKSPACE to undo the last change.

To apply the new placement point to the assembly, press ENTER or RETURN.

Press ESC to cancel without applying the new placement point.  Or, press TAB to center the assembly in the view.

After applying the new placement point, your previous camera view will be restored.  The assembly dialog settings have been modified but if you want to apply them to an assembly that has previously been built, you need to select the assembly and click the 'Apply Assembly Attributes' button.

As you can see, after clicking the apply button, the selected assembly has been updated so that the bottom left point of the grade beam is now at the ground plane.  Note that the offsets of the various assembly parts have changed